nice flipping loft at 49 Howard Street

aka 307 Canal Street
This building caught my eye this week when I noted the Manhattan loft #3N at 49 Howard Street was sold on October 13 to a Swedish couple for $1.9mm after having been bought in February 2008 for $1,272,812, then gutted and nicely dolled up. I don’t know what the renovator-flipper paid to rebuild this condo loft that is probably not “1,500 sq ft” (StreetEasy), but is probably “1,233 sq ft” (architect designer drawing) or “1,234 sq ft” (Property Shark), but there’s got to be a nice profit in there between Purchase ($1,272,812) + Reno ($300,000?) + carrying costs and the purchase by the Swedes at $1.9mm. I’d hope!

a little history
This is an interesting little (5-story) building with a little bit of interesting history that I can see. The building changed hands in 1997 for $1.55mm, probably with the ground floor hardware store that fronts on the Canal Street side of the building, probably with a mix of residential (legal??) and commercial use above the first floor. It was turned into a condo with 2 commercial units fronting on Canal and six residential units on the upper three floors with a Howard Street entrance in 2008. It looks like there were 4 “insiders” who paid a pittance for their residential spaces in the conversion. (In this usage, a “pittance” is around $100/ft, as in One Hundred Dollars Per Foot.) Although the insider lofts ranged from “1,214 sq ft” to “1,785 sq ft”, all four insiders paid $136,890.

Two residential unit were sold to outsiders. Bear with me, and I will get back to one of those units….

There is a sense that this building was in a foggy region (the fog that on old maps indicated the limits of the known world) between prime Soho, Chinatown and the moat that is Canal Street. Howard Street runs only four blocks, west from Centre Street to Mercer, and there is very little car traffic other than cars with business in the bottom block of Crosby, who need Howard Street to get anywhere. Not much pedestrian traffic, either. Martin Scorcese, who knows a thing or two about Manhattan street life, used this stretch of Howard Street in his 1985 film, After Hours. (If you click on the trailer, pay particular attention to the street view in the scene with the Mr. Softee truck.) I.e., d-e-s-o-l-a-t-e.

Here is what a graffiti artist Ellen Harvey had to say about this particular building in 2000, from the Howard Street side, in a book about her street art adventures written in 2005 (New York Beautification Project):

For some reason, this building in SoHo has avoided gentrification. It is completely covered with graffiti and full of garment workers. It’s a bit like going back in time.

Harvey talks about having to avoid the garment business owner on Howard Street. Her Beautification Project #9 was on this building; when she returned to photograph it the next morning, it had already been substantially covered by still more recent graffiti. She took her photos anyway (see the book excerpt). Back to #3N….

nice flip you have there, sir
#3N is one of the two residential lofts sold at outsider prices in the 2008 conversion. If it is “1,234 sq ft” or so, the raw sale price of $1,272,812 comes to the Peak-pricing of $1,031/ft. Pretty much the Peak for a raw 3rd floor walk-up with only three windows at one end. The listing page on StreetEasy will frustrate you with the duplicate photos and the lack of a floor plan; I found the pix very hard to ‘read’ to get a sense of the space. But it is clear that he was selling a total gut job:

Beams/ Metal Gates/ And Brick Throughout And Was Completely Torn Down To The Beams And Rebuilt With 14 Foot Ceilings….

Without a listing photo of any bedroom, and with all the babble and proper names in the listing, I confess to have overlooked a … errr …  rather unusual element of the design. Come with me to the architect’s design firm’s website [update: see comment, below] to see what I mean.

what the heck is that thing?
The architect’s design firm’s website will make you work for it, but from the home page click <Showcase> then page <2>, then on <49 Howard> and it will be worth the work. Many, many before, in renovation, and after pix, plus before and after floor plans. I am still not sure if the “second bedroom” is usable, or even where it is, or where that amazing closet is. But I can see this is high-end design (not necessarily to my taste, but it is [still] a free country).

From these many photos and the before-and-after floor plans you can see what those “ten foot glass doors” do: they bring light into the master bedroom at the (otherwise) dark end of the loft. Look closely at the master bedroom photos.

Yes, somebody designed it with a huge bathtub in the master bedroom. Undoubtedly there is a proper proper name for this tub, and the modifier “soaking”. And, yes, someone else bought it that way.

YouTube shows the stairwell, and more
Because the inter-tubes are amazing and The Google is my friend, I can bring you two short videos taken inside a 5th floor loft in this building and (for some reason) the stairwell just this past July. I don’t speak Italian, so if the guy narrating in Italian says something bad, I am sorry.

The one labeled #5N is probably really in #5S, as he looks out window at Canal Street, not Howard Street. Regardless, that loft probably looks very much like #3N looked before the guts got ripped out and it turned into a high-end loft: windows on only one end, plumbing on one side. Both 5th floor lofts are around 1,500 sq ft, so this one is a little bigger than #3N whether it is #5S or #5N, but it is always hard to ‘measure’ a big open space.

The video in which the guy walks down the stairs and out onto Howard Street is interesting (to me) only because it is an example of loft neighborhood buildings that look … errr … somewhat pedestrian from the street and from the entrance and from the stairs, yet can house beautiful (expensive!) spaces. Those Swedes paid $1,540/ft to walk two flights up in this building, and they may have the single well-renovated loft in the building. I will stop now, before I digress, again….

© Sandy Mattingly 2010